The Inventor of the iPhone Has Some Thoughts

You, my beloved audience, are greedy little advice goblins. 

Each week, I receive two varieties of comments without fail. 1st) “Very actionable, good takeaways!” Or 2nd) “Too theoretical, needs takeaways!” If I do not tell you, with painfully exacting detail, how you should invest or operate differently because of what I researched, someone will complain about it. 

This is entirely understandable. The majority of business books are so atrociously loquacious, so horrendously long-winded, that the authors could’ve had a career as a set of bagpipes. (To clarify: this is a joke about them being full of hot air). 

In response to this phenomenon, the intelligent connoisseur of strategy-guru-type books has developed an aversion to anything that doesn’t cut to the heart of the matter immediately. If something even faintly smells of a 500-word idea stretched into a 3,000-word essay, the rejection reaction is swift and powerful.

While this means I can’t write as fun or theoretical as I would sometimes like, I understand and respect why y’all feel this way. That being said, I’ll never change and you can go kick rocks if you don’t like how I do things around here.

Entirely hypocritically, I hold the same view about every other creator on planet earth besides myself. I hate when a business writer draws it out for the sake of ego. 

Thankfully for all of us brevity maximalists, today is a review of a book that should scratch that perverted itch for concise, actionable takeaways. Today we are talking about Build by Tony Fadell which was just published a month ago. I hope to answer two questions: is the book good and is his argument correct. 

Is the Book Good?

Fadell is a renowned figure among the consumer gadget nerds—he led the teams that invented the iPod, the iPhone, and was the CEO/Co-founder of Nest, which sold to Google for mucho dinero. I am an unabashed fan of what he has helped create. The iPhone is, in my opinion, one of the most important inventions since the Gutenberg press. I find it so inspiring that I have this hanging on my wall. 

Fadell leverages that experience to create something that is housed between book covers but isn’t what I would describe as a novel. It felt more like an internal wiki of his brain. There was a rough storyline where the reader follows the progression of his career. But really, the meat of the text is found in the content guide. Pick the problem you are facing, open up the chapter, and away you go.